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Do you favor the re-opening of U.S. and Cuban embassies, and lifting of the trade embargo?

People applying for travel visas wait in line outside the U.S. Interests Section building that has served as the American outpost in Havana under the auspices of the Swiss government in Cuba. On July 1, President Barack Obama urged Congress to follow his decision to reopen the American embassy in Havana by lifting the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. (Noah Friedman-Rudovsky/Bloomberg)

The road to renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba will most assuredly be bumpy. There is just too much history, the vast majority of it bad, for the process to be anything but.

That doesn’t mean that the journey isn’t worth it; especially after 54 years of getting nowhere. A majority of Americans, in poll after poll, want to see where this new road takes us — including ending a devastating trade embargo that has been ineffective at causing regime change, and stands as arguably the most dismal foreign policy failure in modern U.S. history.

The re-opening of embassies in each nation later this month is a major step down this new diplomatic road, one that should be welcomed by Congress as a chance to finally end the demagoguery keeping both countries wedded to the failed diplomacy of the past.

President Barack Obama, in his statement announcing the embassy agreement, recognized the futility of the attempt to isolate Cuba stating, “[i]nstead of supporting democracy and opportunity for the Cuban people, our efforts to isolate Cuba despite good intentions increasingly had the opposite effect — cementing the status quo and isolating the United States from our neighbors in this hemisphere. When something isn’t working, we can, and will, change.”

That argument, unfortunately, continues to fall on deaf ears among leading politicians who condemn the latest move and champion attempts to block Obama’s efforts to renew diplomatic relations. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, referred to the opening of embassies as an example of Obama’s “appeasement of dictators.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, has stated that he will block the appointment of any ambassador to Cuba unless Obama “can demonstrate that he has made some progress in alleviating the misery … of the Cuban people.”

Fathom, a newly introduced brand of the Carnival Corp., is expected to begin offering seven-day cruises to Cuba from PortMiami in May. (Contributed by Carnival Corp.)

Right. But missing from such brash criticisms is what they would do differently from the past half-century that would yield that desired outcome.

Don’t dismiss the Castro regime’s ongoing violations of human rights. At bottom, the Cuban government — under the dictatorial thumb of Fidel and Raul Castro — is to blame for the plight of its people. They need to be pressured to improve the treatment of Cuba’s citizens, as well as end limits access to information, and the arbitrary arrests of dissidents and independent journalists.But, the embargo helps none of these things.

“I wonder if the Cubans who have to stand in line for the most basic necessities for hours in the hot Havana sun feel that this approach is helpful to them,” Carlos Gutierrez, a Cuban-born American and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce under George W. Bush, wrote in the The New York Times.

A rhetorical stand with the Cuban people is easy. Doing something substantially different to help them is hard.